Mike Pence’s Plan

Add Mike Pence to the growing list of 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls. Although the Indiana governor has insisted he is focusing on his state, he is widely perceived to be testing the waters. This week, he will pitch his variation of Medicaid expansion at the American Enterprise Institute.

There have been Pence for president boomlets in the past, but this one makes more sense on paper. Movement conservatives have frequently been elected to the House and Senate, but rarely have they been governors. Pence’s 2012 election as the 50th governor of Indiana gives him the executive experience that Beltway right favorites from Jack Kemp to Paul Ryan have lacked.

Pence did his tour of duty on Capitol Hill, however. He was elected to the House in 2000—the same year George W. Bush, with whom Pence shares mannerisms, won the presidency—and served six terms, peaking at chairman of the Republican conference.

But Pence wasn’t always a reliable vote for Bush or the leadership. He voted against No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and the Wall Street bailout. He was an early critic of the period’s excessive spending, a subject on which many Republicans only found religion after Barack Obama became president.

After the disastrous 2006 elections, Pence challenged John Boehner for minority leader. He got crushed 168 to 27, but remained a leader of the caucus’s conservative wing. Pence’s plaintive description of the GOP at that time became something of a rallying cry on the right: “Republicans didn’t just lose our majority, we lost our way.”

The former radio talk show host is an evangelical Christian. He is also a “three-legged stool” conservative, who unlike Mitt Romney or John McCain doesn’t have to flip-flop on any major issue to check the standard boxes.

Three issues could nevertheless doom Pence with conservatives long before the primaries roll around. Each are more important to activists than your average voter, but significant enough to allow other viable candidates to get to his right. Taken together, they could seriously erode conservatives’ trust in Pence.

With great fanfare, Pence signed legislation pulling Indiana out of Common Core, making it the first state to junk the controversial education standards many Tea Party conservatives see as a precursor to a national curriculum. “I believe education is a state and local function,” he said. He then embraced new academic standards that were panned as “warmed over” Common Core.

Hoosiers Against Common Core describes Pence’s standards as “re-branding Common Core” and the bill he signed back in March as “a ruse to fool Common Core opponents.” The group says on its website, “The legislation gave the appearance of voiding the Common Core while the Indiana Department of Education and the Center for Education and Career Innovation walked it through the backdoor.”

Then Pence announced he would accept the federal funds that come with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. But he vowed to seek a waiver that would allow him to pursue Medicaid reforms based on former Gov. Mitch Daniels’s Healthy Indiana Plan rather than the traditional Medicaid plan.

“Reforming traditional Medicaid through this kind of market-based, consumer-driven approach is essential to creating better health outcomes and curbing the dramatic growth in Medicaid spending,” the governor said.

Some conservatives see this too as sleight of hand. One complained to the Indianapolis Star it was “merely the latest iteration of full Obamacare Medicaid expansion thinly disguised as a conservative entitlement reform.” Other critics wrote at Forbes, “Gov. Pence has tried to cover his ObamaCare expansion plan with the veneer of the Healthy Indiana Plan begun by Mitch Daniels.”

Those who have followed Pence since he was in Congress may remember a third instance where he tried to split the baby on a contentious issue. In May 2006, as House Republicans stood against an immigration plan hatched by Bush, John McCain, and Ted Kennedy, Pence gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in which he outlined “a rational middle ground” between “amnesty and mass deportation.”

Pence’s proposal was an ambitious guest-worker program that essentially privatized a large part of immigration enforcement. “Private worker placement agencies that we could call ‘Ellis Island Centers’ will be licensed by the federal government to match willing guest workers with jobs in America that employers cannot fill with American workers,” he said.

Like credit card companies and temp agencies, these companies will do all the required screenings “in a matter of days.” There was a flicker of interest before feasibility questions arose. Would illegal immigrants really return home to apply to Ellis Island Centers? Wouldn’t these private companies have a conflict of interest when it came to keeping anyone out? Wasn’t this really amnesty by another name?

The Pence immigration plan went nowhere. Neither will his presidential bid if he acquires a reputation as someone who opposes liberal initiatives only to refurbish them as “market-based” versions of the same.

Time will tell whether Pence is a conservative savior or another Republican who has lost his way.

How could anyone write about Pence — especially in TAC — without mentioning at all that he was among the most crazed of the warmongers in Congress? A Congressman who made foreign policy (in his case war-promotion) a central feature of his time in office and it gets not a mention? Hmm…strange.

While all three issues mentioned are troubling (softness on amnesty is usually a deal breaker for me), conservatives should unite early and get behind one candidate. Although Bush was a disaster, I think governors tend to make pretty decent presidents and would have appeal to independents and others in the middle in the election. Conservatives need to realize that some compromise is necessary. After all Reagan was fairly middle of the road as governor of Calif. If we insist on purity, the establishment will win once again and the nominee will be a Jeb Bush or Chris Christie.

There is no way out for any Republican on health care. Big business overwhelmingly wants a single payer plan so they can get health costs of their own books. Certain favored lobbies, like drug companies, love Obamacare because it assures they will be paid for all of the maintenance drugs they create (all those drugs that deal with symptoms like high cholesterol or blood pressure, those that deal with disruptive children, etc.). Big insurance hates single payer because they don’t want to go out of business. So called Tea Party types like the illusion of choice with health care (you only have choices in big cities)(and who exactly prices cardiac care during a heart attack?) so they oppose any government plan. Tea Party types also hate to pay for medical care for the poor. Paradoxically, big business also does not want to pay for medical care for the poor; it likes a system that forces the poor to take low wage jobs (I think big business really wants a single payer plan that pays only for medical care for those who work).

It is too late for America. The Republic is dead and buried and the Constitution is a dead letter. On top of that America is hopelessly in unsustainable debt. The Political Class out numbers and therefore out votes the Economic Class. The “Dollar” is on it’s last legs with the next step being severe inflation. The real power in America is the power behind the throne. That power is not the politicians who have been bought sand paid for but the elitists and the globalists who want to bankrupt America and force it into a one world government system with the elitists in control. With that said, what can politicians like Mike Pence do to reverse this fiscal tsunami? The answer is nothing. America has gone so far down the fiscally bankrupt rabbit hole that there is no chance of turning it around. Especially with fiat currency based on debt. The American people turned their backs on honest government and fiscal responsibility in 1913,1934,1965 and in 2001. The Republicans,and Americas,last chance at redemption was Ron Paul. And look what happened to him.

“A republican who has lost his way”: what does that phrase even mean? Nobody can point to coherent, principled direction being following by politicians with R next to their names. There is no “republican way” anymore.

Unfortunately, there are, within the R party, large caucuses of birthers, tea-partiers, climate change denialists and budget nihilists: to the general public, they are defining what “R” means.